Category Archives: Colleges

Here’s a quick take on the UT affirmative action case that ended up in the Supreme Court yesterday. (For particulars about the case, read this DMN link and this NYT one.)

The best point that the University of Texas and other universities have going for them is that schools benefit from diverse student bodies. Students are exposed to a broader world by mixing with others who don’t share their background, including their race. The exposure creates a deeper understanding of the way the world operates.

The second big point on the side of UT et al is that states need diverse leaders coming out of their universities. Businesses, governments, schools, hospitals and the many other institutions that draw upon college graduates need educated employees from all walks of life.

Kenneth Jastrow, a UT grad who once headed Temple-Inland, made this case in a persuasive Texas Tribune piece this week. Wrote Jastrow:

“Diverse leaders are better able to understand, anticipate and penetrate diverse markets. They more readily comprehend the variety of consumer needs and desires specific to particular groups, and therefore more effectively develop products and services that appeal to many different consumer markets. As the world shrinks, the need for diverse leaders grows even more acute.”

Those big-picture views also coincide with the Court’s latest affirmative action ruling from back in 2003. In a case involving the University of Michigan, a narrow majority embraced diversity as a larger good. To rule against UT would require the Court to overturn that precedent, which is a practice that John Roberts said during his confirmation hearings he would be reluctant to adopt.

Roberts, however, did raise a point yesterday that was the best one for those who oppose using race as one of different factors in admissions. At what point do schools develop a “critical mass” of diversity? he asked.

His question was germane and got considerable coverage because the Court said in its 2003 ruling that developing a “critical mass” of diversity was a legitimate goal for a university. The justices left it up to universities, however, to define what that means and when they reach it.

UT didn’t provide Roberts a clear answer. But that is not necessarily the university’s fault. It can’t use numbers to define “critical mass” because that would be using a quota. And the Court has not allowed quotas.

This is a circular issue, so UT has some wiggle room here. But Roberts had a legitimate line of inquiry. And it applies to affirmative action in general: At what point should race no longer be considered in hiring and admission decisions?

I don’t know the answer. But I don’t think we are there yet, especially not in a state whose Hispanic population is exploding.

The other day, my colleague Rodger Jones handed me some interesting information about graduation rates from Texas colleges, which the DMN’s Holly Hacker has been reporting about recently.

If you take Texas A&M and the University of Texas out of the picture, college graduation rates after four years of attending a state university are pretty dismal. The most recent data from the Texas Public Higher Education Almanac shows A&M and Texas graduating half or more of their students in four years. After that, the numbers drop fast.

The University of Texas at Dallas comes in behind those two with 42 percent graduating in four years. Texas Tech is at 40 percent. But UNT is at 24 percent, the University of Houston 17 percent and UT-San Antonio 10 percent.

The percentages look better for six-year graduation rates in a number of schools. But there is a risk in hoping kids get to their sixth year and graduate. The longer students stay in college, their chances of dropping out increase.

What’s more, taxpayers are funding four-year colleges, not six-year institutions. I recognize that many students have to go for a while, drop out, earn some money and go back. But the state also has a stake in this matter, which is why legislators need to give colleges an incentive to graduate more students on time.

One way to do that is to fund colleges based upon graduation rates, not simply enrollment figures. Texas Higher Education Commissioner Raymund Paredes champions this idea. Hopefully, he will have a receptive audience before the 2013 Legislature begins and lawmakers head into the session determined to change the funding formulas. We need more than our flagship universities graduating students in four years.

Today I wrote about state universities, including the University of Texas at Arlington, partnering with for-profit companies to deliver online classes. It’s an approach that’s gaining interest and traction in Texas, among people like Gov. Rick Perry and Jeff Sandefer, who has proposed some controversial “breakthrough solutions” in higher ed.

There’s an interesting regulatory angle to this story, too. I spoke recently with Trace Urdan, a research analyst at Signal Hill investment bank in San Francisco.

“More and more of these creative arrangements are being struck,” said Urdan, who studies the for-profit higher ed sector. One big reason, he said, is investors have shied away from for-profit universities as they’ve come under greater federal scrutiny and regulation.

These new companies like Academic Partnerships, 2tor and Embanet recruit students and provide the online platforms in exchange for a share of tuition revenues. The non-profit universities lend their brand, which tend to be stronger than those of for-profit schools, Urdan said.

Investors, he said, “want to benefit from the growth and demand of online degree programs but also benefit from the high quality of the not-for-profit brands.”

Speaking of for-profit colleges, their association is meeting in Grapevine today through Wednesday. Lots of interesting topics. One panel deals with “growing federal unease with online education across all sectors” of higher education. Another panel focuses on the new rules that require for-profit colleges to prepare their students for “gainful employment,” or possibly lose federal student aid.

Editor’s Note:We recently heard from UT-Dallas President David Daniel and University of North President Lane Rawlins on the role student evaluations should play in assessing professors, which is one of the pillars in Jeff Sandefer’s controversial “Seven Breakthrough Solutions” for Texas colleges. Today, we hear from UT-Arlington President James Spaniolo. Here’s how he answered this question that The Education Front put to him:

How much authority should students have in evaluating their professors?

Students should and do have a role in helping evaluate how effective faculty members are teaching. They are given the opportunity to provide feedback to their professors at the end of each course based on standardized questions. Their feedback is important both to the professors teaching the courses and those who are responsible for assessing faculty members overall contributions, which include not just teaching but also research and scholarship and service.

The challenge is to weigh student reactions to faculty teaching as a valuable input without it becoming the sole criterion for determining what is effective teaching. Students are more than simply consumers; they are learners. Even their own reactions to the value of and effectiveness of the courses they take may change over time. Judging the value of what is learned from a course is far more complex than the results of a popularity poll.

Editor’s Note: Jeff Sandefer’s hotly-debated Seven Breakthrough Solutions for colleges depends a good deal upon students evaluating their professors. Below are responses from University of Texas at Dallas President David Daniel and University of North Texas President Lane Rawlins to the following question The Education Front put to them.

How much authority should students have in evaluating their professors?

David Daniel, University of Texas at Dallas

Student evaluations are important inputs, among many, for university leaders who evaluate faculty performance annually. Student evaluations are especially valuable when consistent patterns develop from responses by different students in different sections of a course.

The most valuable student evaluations include written comments and suggestions for improvement, such as “talk more slowly,” or “take more time to explain concepts,” or “have office hours after 5 p.m.” This kind of specific, concrete suggestion is helpful and actionable. Students have a strong voice in helping instructors to become even more effective teachers. This, to me, is the most important aspect of student evaluations.

When students, in a consistent manner, paint a picture of a professor with significant strengths or deficiencies, student reviews can provide valuable input to decisions varying from making a teaching award for exceptional teaching to termination of unsatisfactory teachers. We would not likely ever give a teaching award or terminate an instructor solely on the basis of student evaluations, but these evaluations often play an important role in such actions, either positive or negative.

Individual student evaluations can be significantly influenced by the grade that the student expects to make in the course (higher expected grade equals higher teacher evaluation) and by the likability of the professor (more likeable professor equals higher teacher evaluation). What is important is what a student has learned and how his or her critical thinking skills have been enhanced by a course and instructor; often this is not knowable for some time after the course.

At UT Dallas, we post all student evaluations for all professors and all courses. We believe that this is important information that helps students choose which courses and which sections to take.

Lane Rawlins, University of North Texas

How much authority should students have in evaluating their professors?

The debate over if – or to what degree – a student should have a voice in evaluating professors is an old one. Years ago, I was discussing this issue with a rather passionate colleague who believed student opinions didn’t have a place in rating teaching because the student is more interested in enjoying the class or simply getting a good grade.

I proposed that we each think back to how we had rated our own professors and consider if we would change those ratings because they’d been based on something other than how much we’d learned. In most cases, we didn’t change our minds. Personally, there were only two instances where I would have changed a rating. One was for a statistics class that I didn’t particularly enjoy and that was rather dull. As a labor economist and university administrator, however, understanding statistics has proven to be really useful. In contrast, I thoroughly enjoyed a foreign affairs course that as it turned out, unfortunately, was full of information that was no longer relevant or tied to the then-modern reality.

So certainly students should play an important role in the complete evaluation of effective teaching. Indeed, the student is the only person who can say if he actually learned something. And the ability to reach a student is a necessary condition of being able to teach well.

However, the student generally does not know if what he learned is accurate, relevant and tied to the latest research. So student reviews must only be a piece of a comprehensive set of metrics that also includes peer reviews and assessment of the information being taught in accurately evaluating a professor’s teaching quality.

The central flaw in Jeff Sandefer’s Seven Breakthrough Solutions for colleges, which have hit the University of Texas campus like a lightning strike, is the degree to which they give students power over their professors. Look, for example, at his proposals for evaluating profs. It essentially would give students the largest voice in reviewing their teachers.

I’m all in favor of students having a say. As a UT student in the 1970s, I often felt like my teachers saw their students as widgets. When I had profs who really engaged us, which often meant teaching assistants, I loved it.

But despite those frustrations, I do not think student evaluations should carry so much weight. It would be pretty easy for students to carry a grudge with them as they evaluate a teacher.

Look also at Sandefer’s proposal about teacher bonuses. They would be voluntary, so no teacher would have to try to get one. But they would be based upon how well “the customers,” namely the students, assess their teachers.

Here, too, I certainly think students should have some voice. But they shouldn’t have the lion’s share. Faculty review, perhaps from outside a department, should have some say.

Sandefer thinks that allowing faculty to rate itself is “an alternative with
serious conflict of interest problems.” I would say no more than asking students to determine their teacher’s bonus. (The conflict there would be teachers trying to placate students so they don’t get mad at them.)

Obviously, Sandefer has gotten folks’ attention. As Holly Hacker blogged here this week, the president of UT just dealt with his ideas in a speech.

I just hope that everyone slows down a moment and thinks through the consequences, particularly about the role of students. The issue isn’t whether they should have a voice. Rather, it’s how much of one should they have. I think Sandefer’s giving them too much authority.

Ever since 2003, when the Texas Legislature voted to let public universities set their own tuition rates, a few lawmakers have tried to take that power back. And those efforts go nowhere.

Apparently it happened again today in the Senate. The office of Sen. Rodney Ellis, D-Houston, reports the Senate voted to table his amendment to end tuition deregulation (i.e., give tuition-setting powers back to lawmakers) by 2013.

“Six years ago we overwhelmingly decided the legislature had abdicated its responsibility and let tuition soar out of control. The Senate today said ‘that’s ok.’ Now more Texas families will struggle to meet the skyrocketing costs of college,” Ellis said in a statement.

Lawmakers agreed to let public universities set their own tuition rates in 2003 to offset a drop in state funding per student. And the budget shortfall wasn’t nearly as big then as it is in 2011. Something tells me most lawmakers are very happy to not take the heat for any future tuition hikes.

The proposal by new UT board of regents chairman Gene Powell to increase the University of Texas at Austin by 18,000 students over a period of time is, to put it mildly, mind-boggling.

I went to UT in the 1970s and it was big then. It is even bigger now. How it would help students by going from 38,000 undergrads to 56,000 undergrads, as the DMN’s Holly Hacker reported on this blog yesterday, is beyond me.

Part of the college experience is to create a relationship between the professor and the student. It was very hard to do that when I was an undergrad there. Classes were often too large for other than the most extroverted students to really get to know the prof. Adding more students would make the experience even more impersonal.

Fortunately, another group of UT folks oppose Powell’s idea. As Hacker reports, the Commission of 125 proposed back in 2004 limiting enrollment, not increasing it. That way, the school could have a better student-professor ratio.

I’m all for that. UT offered much that I loved: a strong identity, compelling educational choices, and good facilities. The size also forced me, and I bet others, to figure out where they stood amidst such a sea of people. That was hard, but healthy.

But a big university also makes it difficult for some kids to speak up in class, engage their professors and form relationships that go beyond the classroom. That’s always going to be a challenge for a big school like UT. But growing it so much bigger would make that challenge, in my book, virtually unwinnable. And that would harm UT and its students.

The trick that Texas universities and college face, as they tackle Gov. Rick Perry’s $10,000 degree challenge, is to offer a degree that actually means something, one with quality. And that can be done, the state’s higher education commissioner said Wednesday.

The next time you hear a politician wax on about Texas depending upon brains more than brawn, don’t tune him or her out. They are onto something. And that “something” the Legislature should keep in mind as lawmakers take knives to education budgets this year.

This Wall Street Journal article notes how the Sunbelt is showing the greatest growth in college graduates. Whereas they once lived in abundance in states like New York, college grads are now disproportionately living in states like Texas, North Carolina and California.

This story is based upon a Brookings Institution analysis. And the Journal reports that the analysis shows that four of our metropolitan areas were among “the 20 biggest magnets” for college graduates from 2007-2009. (Sorry, I haven’t had time to dig into the report myself.)

Legislators should remember this data when they get down to making budget choices. College graduates are not going to want to live in a place where schools get eviscerated. Nor will they want to live in a place where legislators back off their commitment to build more leading research universities.

I’m in the camp that thinks public education and colleges will have put some programs on the altar this year. The budget deficit looks that bad. But legislators would make a big mistake asked for too much of a sacrifice. We’ve got something going. Let’s don’t blow it.

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